


lost gospels

by crowroad



Category: Supernatural
Genre: Brother Feels, Curtain Fic, Endings, Episode: s15e19 Inherit the Earth, Post-Episode: s15e19 Inherit the Earth, Season/Series 15, Spoilers
Language: English
Status: Completed
Published: 2020-11-14
Updated: 2020-11-14
Packaged: 2021-03-10 00:28:21
Rating: Not Rated
Warnings: Creator Chose Not To Use Archive Warnings
Chapters: 1
Words: 1,276
Publisher: archiveofourown.org
Story URL: https://archiveofourown.org/works/27555367
Author URL: https://archiveofourown.org/users/crowroad/pseuds/crowroad
Summary: A blank book is a smoking gun. Or: how to choose your own ending.
Relationships: Dean Winchester & Sam Winchester, Dean Winchester/Sam Winchester
Comments: 4
Kudos: 31





	lost gospels

**Author's Note:**

> a companion for [Unforgotten](https://archiveofourown.org/works/27429739)

There were no angels in those days. They had been gone for years, centuries even; no-one could remember for sure. There were some who claimed to have seen them tumbling, years ago, like meteors; some who claimed to have been possessed, some who said two archangels had destroyed each other over a father's love; scorched earth in a graveyard full of crows. Some said god had murdered his own, human, animal, and angel alike, and that the world had somehow gone on, after that. 

Some claimed to have seen god themself, in the guise of a young man, walking and smiling and pristine, as though the world were, indeed, new.

*****

Generativity, Sammy, Dean says. ( _What, I read_.) 

Yeah, Sam says, I think we’ve already covered that.

It’s seven-thirty, golden-hour summertime for them to drive into, or take a knee, work on some reading or field some calls; hunters in distress or wanting to gossip, or just jaw, or invite them to remember one of their own, in Canada or Florida or up the road.

Case up on the Nebraska border, Dean says, maybe a—

That one’s human, Sam says, a—

One of your serials, Dean says and sets down a beer and waits for Sam to tell him.

*****

Dean built a house for his brother. For Sam and the family he was meant to have, not far from the bunker, in town, salted and warded and connected to it by corridors only they could see.

Their son looks a lot like Dean; their daughter, shockingly, more like the Queen of Hell than her real mother. She starts signing before she’s one. They call her—

Nope, Dean says, and stops Sam’s hand before he writes his children’s names there, in their sacred book, like those are the two things he’ll keep to himself, the two he’ll carry with him out of the fire.

*****

Two graves--two brothers, the tour guide says. There are no tours in this town but she’s self-appointed, just to remind newbies that this the geographical center, a place of gravity and high-key strangitude.

Who were they, new dude says. He’s kind of gothy, predictably, though he’ll go full wolf before long.

She tells him, best she can, laying it on a little, pieces and bits from the diner, the clinic, the Wal-Mart where her bestie’s stepmom worked when she was younger. She’s written it all down.

Were they—new dude says. He doesn’t look scared.

Yeah, she says, they were.

She’s written it all down. Set it next to her bed, locked like an old-school diary. Warded.

There’s fantasy and there’s real life and one of them is better.

*****

Sam smiles when he reads that: two spinster [ _sic_ ] brothers who lived and died fighting monsters.

Who knew.

*****

Witchery has never been Dean’s forte but now? No problem that Sam’s got the books and the bowls out, the burns out; the pestled powder and the scarlet flame.

There are more gardens here now, more places where things twine, shoot through this underground; more names of trees that Dean knows when they drive out, ice a vamp, talk seriously about--

retiring.

_Lannraich gu dealrach a-nis_ , Sam says, and there, that admiration, for the way his brother’s tongue has always rolled with the Latin, Enochian; the Gaelic.

Whaddya think, Sammy, he wants to say--

_One day we’re old. One day we’ve outlived everyone we’ve ever loved and you get out the bowls and the books and--_

_All of our places are there for the taking._

*****

Dean wakes up and she’s there, or she was, the one woman he brings to the bunker these days; leather-panted, steady; retired hunter, someone Sam talks to at breakfast and makes fun of Dean’s foibles with.

But it isn’t her speaking; she’s not there. This voice has no body:

Dean? 

Something black in his memory; a warmth. Someone he hasn’t heard from in years.

Cas? he says.

It's your choice, Dean, Cas says.

He reaches out. Even now, when he can’t see.

It always was, Cas says.

How do you choose an ending? 

Is what he might think, if he still could.

A blank book is a smoking gun. A knife under your pillow.

Something only death can read.

*****

Dean! Sam says. His brother must be around somewhere. He’d only just turned the page.

These days, it isn't so clear what time is, and if one of them wanders it warrants a shout. All that dimensional shift, all that ( _possession, dispossession, desouling, resouling, transformation down to the quarks_ )-- it schools you to be without bodies. To: give them up if not give up on them. Not necessarily to believe in heaven though, or hell, as those are as real places as any.

The trick is to be unencumbered, so you can move between worlds without effort or spell. So you can be earth, or ether, without losing track of your form, or who you were, or who your brother was. So you can be a word if you choose, or a whole story, or something else. The rumble in a car's engine; your brother's lungs; your own heart entire. 

A book is a blessing, more than a grave, or a road, but those things are in there too.

*****

There are people who claim to have seen god, like some post-plague sending, like—

Up in Lawrence, sometimes, or along the Missouri or out in the tallgrass with the grouse.

Just walking along and talking to his fathers like god might have been cornfed; born and raised and fought with and loved.

*****

Sam’s been writing it down all day and at dusk they drive out. 

Perseids tonight, Dean says. It reminds them of another time. Of all the other times.

Dean’s been waiting for Sam to say it.

When they catch the first one falling Sam tilts his head so far back, statics his brother’s shoulder in the dark.

I don’t know Dean—

Fire. Angels falling.

_I think we were always free._

*****

In those days, people didn’t know that they could get off the bus, so to speak, that they could choose a different way if they wanted, that they lived with monsters and ghosts but they always had a choice. It took a lot of work to remind them.

[ _sic erat scriptum_ ]

*****

Drizzly Kansas Thursday, not so long after:

Old cases; old files; data; handwritten leatherbound they've never lost.

Dude, you punched god in the face, Dean says, nearly chokes on his drink.

You killed death --twice, Sam says. 

Dean says: Did you ever think when you were--

( _At Stanford when you were free and not sure of it and you drove up the coast in a borrowed Subaru and saw how your normal life could die when you thought about your brother dying and you not there when you did die and he died and you died together and came back._ )

Sam says: No.

_Maybe we're ultraterrestrials because we just can't leave._

Dean laughs and glasses clink and a diner napkin, yellowed and scratched upon, drifts to the floor.

This life is ridiculous and we know it and everyone who knows about it knows it.

It's ridiculous and _you_ know it 

But it's true.

*****

The bunker is asleep, though everything works, clicking and humming; secreting. Cars in the garage; dead men’s robes, recipes; surfaces etched with the names of those who’ve, well, not passed on, but gone into magic of their own devising.

There are ghosts sometimes; a spirit or two, sleeping or slapping at doors; stumbling, like legacies, on what the world needs.

The entry's magicked shut. The library is quiet.

The shelves are carefully arranged, and full of life.


End file.
